An Agent-Oriented, Workflow-Based Mobile Framework for Implementing Interoperable Healthcare Information Systems

Healthcare is an increasingly collaborative enterprise involving many individuals and organizations that coordinate their efforts toward promoting quality and efficient delivery of healthcare. To these ends, today, more than any other point in time, increased reliance is being placed on interoperability among healthcare information systems (HIS) which have been developed as monolithic, stand-alone systems without significant interfaces between them. Enabling heterogeneous HIS to interact within a Service-oriented architecture (SOA), such as a Web Services architecture, can help healthcare organizations to consistently deliver sustainable business value, with increased agility and cost effectiveness, in line with changing business needs. However, in the context of a SOA approach, issues of semantic interoperability still remain unresolved while new challenges arise regarding web service interoperability. This paper presents a mediation framework which provides a uniform interface to the underlying HIS and is accessible via Android-enabled devices. The proposed framework is based on the agent paradigm for both healthcare process management and management of interactions among the participating systems. The healthcare processes and all interactions involved in each process are described according to the workflow metaphor.